In comparison to other industries, Home Healthcare organizations face the most unique and personal challenges when it comes to employee scheduling. Clients trust their care providers for important treatments and services. Missing even a single appointment could lead to serious consequences if healthcare scheduling goes awry.
Common Workforce Challenges
- Hiring the right staff is critical. Yes, you will need well-trained, qualified caregivers. But you will also need skilled employees in the office to handle the many day-to-day management duties. Recruiting the best talent takes time and patience.
- Frontier Scheduling for Modern Medicine – getting caregivers to the right place, at the right time. In conjunction with the correct skills, equipment, and medicine to provide effective care for the clients.
- Matching caregivers and clients is one of the most important parts of the scheduling process. A bad client/caregiver match can leave your client underwhelmed with his or her service. This leaves them uninspired to recommend your service to others. With a bad match, one risks losing the client, but also damaging the agency’s reputation in the process. A great match, on the other hand, makes both the client and caregiver happy. Celayix’s scheduling software helps agencies match caregivers and clients based on several different criteria.
- Manually creating a weekly schedule can take hours. Instead, you could use this time to ensure the best possible patient care! It also allows one to focus on building referral relationships and growing the business. Adapting advanced shift planning while considering different schedules, training, and accreditation for specific tasks and working preferences, etc.
What can you do?
The solution to these issues would be large doses of optimization, mobility, and cloud technologies. Home healthcare providers that will achieve healthy productivity will be the ones that adopt a real-time care delivery strategy. These solutions guarantee high quality, flexible service that organizes and integrates every aspect of your workforce.
Through mobile optimization, providers can ensure immediate connectivity and collaboration by eliminating the paper processes. They can generate real-time information from synchronized mobile devices, and utilize artificial intelligence capabilities. In addition, a cloud-based platform enables rapid deployment, pay-as-you-go options, and immediate return on investments.
The Home Healthcare industry has many challenges. Specifically with regards to efficiently scheduling healthcare workers and tracking their time and attendance. To remain profitable, Home Healthcare providers need to manage their workforce with effective and efficient employee scheduling. Yes, this involves making sure that caregivers are in the right place at the right time. It does also mean ensuring that they have the right qualifications to provide the support and service that patients require.
Tracking and monitoring hours worked by home health care staff can also become a challenge. It’s important to ensure you’re always delivering on what clients request, and that you bill them properly. This helps maintain your business’ reputation and trust with clients.
Over the years Celayix has found solutions specific to employee scheduling and employee time & attendance in the Home Healthcare industry. We want to help you start on the path to solving your scheduling problems. So, we’ve answered the top three questions from Healthcare providers below!
How do we ensure staff with the proper qualifications are matched and scheduled to deliver on clients’ health care needs?
Rules-based scheduling is the answer to this problem! You need software that allows you to collect and store information about each employee’s specific skill set. Be sure to include any certificates or training and set up alerts when those qualifications expire.
Before you create a schedule, you simply set rules in place. These should filter out any employees that do not meet your clients’ requirements. Doing this drastically decreases any scheduling errors and ensures proper patient care.
View our help guide in creating business rules here!
How can we avoid time theft by employees?
Tracking a mobile workforce is possible and easy with the power of the Internet or telephone. Hold your workforce accountable by having them clock in/out upon arriving and departing from a client’s home. You can easily do this on your phone! Essentially, with the power of GPS technology, you don’t have to worry about ‘buddy punching‘! (We use our geofencing feature for this!)
There are also measures you can take if an employee forgets to clock in/out or not arriving at a client’s residence. For example, system alerts can be put into place to notify supervisory or administrative staff. A quick call can then be placed to the employee to question the missed clock-in. If need be, replace that employee instantly via text messaging or email via other health care workers in the area.
Why does billing have to take so much time, and how can I decrease the number of mistakes?
If possible, always integrate your scheduling software with your payroll provider. With accurate data flow, this is proven to save time and money for Healthcare organizations.
Many billing mistakes are made when the information is transcribed manually from one system to another. By having software that speaks to each other, fewer human errors occur. In most cases, an entire person from the administrative team can be placed on other projects. As a result, the business can streamline other areas of its operation.
To learn how we’ve helped increase revenue for several successful businesses in the health care industry, read our case studies!
